Skills-Based Volunteering Is Growing

Rethinking Volunteer Management

Challenging conventional approaches to leading and supporting volunteers

Skills-based volunteering is gaining momentum. Are organisations ready for It?

For companies, it offers employees the opportunity to use the knowledge and expertise they already have to contribute to community organisations. For community organisations, it can provide access to capabilities that may otherwise be difficult to afford or access.

But there is an important question behind this growth:

Are community organisations ready to make good use of skilled volunteers?

International evidence suggests demand is increasing. Benevity's State of Corporate Volunteering 2026 reports that applications for skills-based volunteer programmes grew by 60% among unique volunteers in 2025. At the same time, 57% of companies surveyed planned to increase their investment in skills-based volunteering.

This is significant. But skills-based volunteering isn't simply traditional volunteering with a different label. It asks organisations to think differently about what they need from volunteers, and how they create opportunities for those skills to make a genuine difference.

From "more volunteers" to "the right skills"

Community organisations have long understood the value of volunteers. But when resources are stretched, the immediate priority can understandably be filling rosters, delivering programmes or finding people to undertake essential tasks.

Skills-based volunteering asks a different question:

What capability does our organisation need that a volunteer could provide?

That might be marketing strategy, website development, financial advice, governance expertise, HR support, photography, graphic design, social media planning, research, database development or mentoring.

It might also involve emerging skills. Benevity's research highlights AI literacy as an important unmet need among nonprofits, creating opportunities for skilled volunteers to support organisations with digital capability and responsible use of AI.

The opportunity is substantial, but only if organisations can articulate what they actually need.

Are we ready to define the work?

One of the challenges with skills-based volunteering is that "we need someone with marketing experience" isn't really a volunteer role.

A skilled volunteer still needs a clear purpose, defined outcomes, boundaries, a timeframe and someone who can work with them.

Instead of:

We need help with our marketing.

A stronger opportunity might be:

We are looking for a marketing professional to review our current communications approach and provide recommendations for a practical six-month marketing plan. The project will involve two online meetings, approximately six hours of independent work and a final presentation to our team.

That is something a professional can understand, assess and commit to.

It also makes it much easier for a company to identify an employee whose skills genuinely match the need.

Research into skills-based volunteering similarly highlights that these programmes sit at the intersection of volunteering, organisational needs and employee development. A systematic review of 36 peer-reviewed articles found that skills-based volunteering can enable employees to contribute specialised skills while also developing their own capabilities.

What are we hearing from New Zealand companies?

This question is particularly relevant to what we heard through Volunteering Auckland's recent Corporate Pulse Survey.

Although our survey involved a small number of respondents, the consistency of the feedback was striking. Every company identified making a positive difference in the community as an important reason for supporting employee volunteering.

But community impact was only part of the picture.

Respondents also identified employee engagement, leadership development, workplace culture, alignment with company values and ESG objectives as important outcomes.

At the same time, companies told us they face challenges finding suitable community partners and quality volunteering opportunities. Importantly, sourcing skills-based volunteering opportunities was also identified as a challenge.

This creates an interesting gap.

Companies may have employees with valuable professional expertise who want to contribute. Community organisations may have significant capability gaps. Yet the two don't automatically connect.

The challenge is creating opportunities that translate a genuine community need into something a skilled volunteer can meaningfully contribute to.

Skills are valuable — but so is the volunteer's time

There is another consideration.

A skilled volunteer may be offering expertise that their employer normally pays for. That does not mean the organisation should treat them as a free consultant.

Good skills-based volunteering still needs to be approached as volunteering.

The volunteer needs a meaningful experience, appropriate support and clear expectations. The organisation needs to retain ownership of its decisions and outcomes. Both parties need to understand what the volunteer can reasonably provide within the time available.

This is particularly important as corporate volunteering becomes more episodic.

Benevity's research shows that around 60% of corporate volunteers now contribute fewer than five hours a year, reflecting a shift towards shorter, more flexible forms of volunteering.

New Zealand is seeing a similar pattern. Volunteering New Zealand's State of the Decade of Volunteering reports a clear shift towards flexible, episodic and shorter-term volunteering, with people giving fewer hours even though overall participation remains strong.

For community organisations, this means designing projects that can achieve something useful within a defined period — rather than assuming a skilled volunteer will become a long-term unpaid staff member.

The project needs an owner

One of the biggest mistakes organisations can make is thinking that bringing in a skilled volunteer means the work has been "outsourced".

It hasn't.

Someone within the organisation still needs to brief the volunteer, provide access to the information they need, answer questions, review the work and decide how recommendations will be implemented.

This takes time.

And that is an important part of being ready for skills-based volunteering: having the organisational capacity to manage the relationship.

Sometimes the answer may even be that an organisation isn't ready for a particular skills-based project yet. That's okay. Identifying that early is much better than creating a frustrating experience for both the organisation and the volunteer.

From volunteering opportunity to strategic partnership

The growth isn't just coming from companies wanting to offer skills-based volunteering. Community organisations themselves are increasingly creating opportunities for people to contribute their professional expertise.

Reach Volunteering's 2025 figures show that charities posted 7,095 skills-based volunteer roles through its platform — a 13.4% increase on 2024. More than 16,000 people volunteered their skills through the platform. The organisation describes this growth as evidence of increasing confidence in skills-based volunteering as a way for charities and social purpose organisations to strengthen their impact and organisational development.

This is an important shift.

Skills-based volunteering isn't simply about finding someone to complete a task. Done well, it can strengthen an organisation's capability.

A marketing professional might help develop a communications strategy. A technology specialist might improve a database. An HR professional could review volunteer policies. A finance professional might help strengthen financial systems. A governance specialist could support board development.

And those individual contributions can sometimes become the beginning of a deeper relationship between a company and a community organisation.

So, are organisations ready?

Perhaps the better question is:

What would it take to become ready?

Community organisations could start by asking:

• What are our biggest capability gaps?
• What work could realistically be completed by a skilled volunteer?
• Can we clearly define the project, outcomes and timeframe?
• Who will support and manage the volunteer?
• What information, systems or access will they need?
• What will success look like?
• How will we acknowledge and use their contribution?

And importantly:

Is this genuinely a volunteering opportunity, or are we looking for work that really requires paid professional support?

Skills-based volunteering should complement, not replace, paid expertise where specialist work is essential.

Moving beyond the hours

Perhaps the biggest opportunity is to change how we think about the value of volunteering.

If a company employee spends three hours helping a community organisation redesign its website, three hours alone doesn't tell us very much.

What if those three hours result in a website that reaches thousands more people?
What if a finance volunteer helps an organisation introduce a better budgeting system?
What if a governance volunteer helps strengthen a board?
What if an experienced manager mentors a community organisation's emerging leader?

The value isn't necessarily in the number of hours contributed. It is in what those hours make possible.

This is particularly important because Benevity's research highlights a growing gap between participation and impact. Corporate volunteering is reaching record levels, but nonprofits report that corporate volunteers do not always contribute meaningfully to long-term capacity. The opportunity is therefore not simply to increase the number of corporate volunteers, but to make their contribution more relevant to what organisations actually need.

A new opportunity for community organisations

Skills-based volunteering is not going to be the answer to every organisational challenge. Nor should community organisations feel pressured to create volunteer roles simply because companies have professional skills to offer.

But where there is a genuine need, a clearly defined project and the capacity to support the relationship, skilled volunteers can bring something incredibly valuable: capability.

For community organisations, this may mean moving from asking:

"How can a volunteer help us?"

to:

"What difference could the right volunteer's skills make?"

That is a more strategic question.

And as companies increasingly look for meaningful ways for their employees to contribute, it may also be the question that opens the door to a new generation of volunteering partnerships.

At Volunteering Auckland, we see an opportunity for community organisations and companies to move beyond simply exchanging time. The future of employee volunteering can be about bringing together community need, professional expertise and shared purpose — in ways that create value for volunteers, companies and, most importantly, the communities they serve.

References
Benevity Impact Labs (2026). The State of Corporate Volunteering 2026
Reach Volunteering (2026). New figures show charities creating more roles for skills-based volunteers.

Volunteering New Zealand (2026). State of the Decade of Volunteering
Dempsey-Brench, K. & Shantz, A. (2022). Skills-based volunteering A systematic literature review of the intersection of skills and employee volunteering. Human Resource Management Review, 32(4), 100874.